Behavior of the electrical resistivity at phase transitions in binary alloys

The excess resistivity of binary alloys is calculated in the Born approximation for the scattering of quasifree electrons from the atomic disorder. can be represented as the convolution of the structure functionS(q) and the fourier transform of the effective potential. The critical anomaly of is derived from scaling expressions forS(q), both for alloys which undergo unmixing and for order-disorder transitions. The variation of with concentration and temperature in the vicinity of a critical point is obtained. The time-dependence of the resistivity of alloys after a sudden quench into the two-phase region is also calculated, using computer simulation data forS(q,t), and a maximum of is found for zones with linear dimension of 8–12 lattice spacings. All these results are in fair agreement with the available experiments. As a further possible application, we obtain the critical exponent for the nonlinear relaxation of the resistivity of an alloy close to the order-disorder transition.